Wednesday, August 26, 2015

My summer was filled with a variety of professional reading, including:

In addition to reading
this book, I took an online course in blended learning. This book
showed me that many models fall under the umbrella of blended learning.
The most powerful blended learning models involve making a school from
the ground up and leveraging technology as a tool for teaching and individualizing
instruction.Little did I
realize that “flipping the classroom” (something I started doing 4 years ago
from time to time) is a blended model.

I first heard about Carol
Dweck’s book when I took a Stanford MOOC course by Jo Boaler called “How to
Learn Math” in the summer of 2014.People with fixed mindsets think their ability to do math is based on
their intelligence or innate ability - that they are born with it.These people get frustrated when learning
doesn’t come quickly to them.Failure
or risk of failure leads them to take an easier path. Growth mindset people
see failure as a part of learning and the effort needed to reach success
makes them smarter.Great ideas, even
though the reading felt like a stream of consciousness at times.

This book looked at innovators in several areas – social innovators,
entrepreneurial innovators and innovators in education.Allowing children time to play and
experiment was seen as important.Letting them work together to fail and learn from their failures was
necessary. The book looked at several college and grade school programs that do
this successfully.The short video clips
were interesting, but were a repeat of what could be read within the body of
the text.

This was actually my daughter’s summer reading book.She did not like it at all, but I told her
I would read it and I did.If I did
plan on writing a memoir, it would have been a very helpful book.A list of suggested memoirs found at the
end of the book looked interesting.Perhaps I will read one or two of these memoirs next summer.

But the most powerful and practical book was...

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel. Thanks to Daren Starnes (AP statistics teacher and super math presenter) for sharing this book during Best Practices Night at the AP Statistics Reading this past summer. Daren's presentation can be found at http://apstatsmonkey.com/StatsMonkey/ReadBestPractice.html. It is the fifth presentation in the list.

If you are not familiar with this book, click on the stack of books shown below to go to a video by Cathy DeHart which provides a good summary of the ideas from the book. Plus there are practical ways to implement those ideas to improve your learning and the learning of your students. My students will be watching this video for homework on the first night of school and I will be using EDPuzzle to embed questions within the video. This will model the same type of self-quizzing students should be doing as they learn new material.

My Plan to Make It Stick

Learning that is easy is stagnant and most likely boring. Think about it. What makes a student stay up late playing video games? It is the challenge of learning the strategy needed to make it to the next level that produces zombie-eyed students in our classes. "Making mistakes and correcting them build the bridge to advanced learning." (Make It Stick, pg. 7) Students get this for video games, because there is low-risk in playing the game. Your character dies, no problem. You have another life or you can always try again. The student wants to persevere. Unfortunately, students (and their parents) don't see mistakes in school as "the bridge to advanced learning". Applying the concepts from the book will hopefully change that a bit.

1) Quiz and Quiz Often - Research shows that frequent low-stakes quizzes produce bigger gains in retention. So, I am going to have quizzes every week on our scheduled lab day for the class. With about 12 quizzes in a semester, I will be able to drop a quiz or two. This means students won't have to make up a quiz when they are absent. In addition, quizzes will count for 50% of my grade for the class, graded homework sets 30% and tests 20%. With each quiz only counting about 5% of the student's grade, they will be low stakes. Plus, tests counted 50% of the students grade in the past and now they are worth less. In the end, I will probably be asking the same total number of questions, but just asking the questions more frequently.

2) Interleaved Practicing - Why do students do poorly on cumulative tests? It is because the concepts are mixed up. However, practice is rarely mixed up. Students do all of one type of problem and then another type of problem. They don't have practice with recognizing the concept in a mixed up set of problems. Sure, my students will hate "mixed" practice. ("But Blah-Blah-Blah was in the last chapter, Mrs. Nataro.") But in the long run, they will do better. Plus, reviewing for the AP exam will really be review and not relearning everything from the fall semester.

3) Write to Learn/Explain to Learn - Although math has a beauty in the efficiency of its communication and its notation, there is much to be learned by explaining something to others and in writing about it. (Hmmm...I am writing now and learning now.) My students do a fair amount of verbal explaining in Geometry and much written explaining in AP Stat. I need to add more of the written explaining in Geometry and the verbal explaining in Stat. I am not quite sure how this will pan out yet. Perhaps by incorporating formal exit tickets from time to time in Geometry and doing a "think-pair-share" verbal class opener from time to time in AP Stat.

4) Give It a Try First - When I was a math student in high school, I didn't want to give things a try first. My motto was "Just show me what to do and I'll do it." But that type of learning is not long lasting. "When you're asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered." (Make It Stick, pg. 86) Having students attempt to solve a problem before I show them how to do it will be challenging for me. It is hard to see students struggle and we want them to be successful. How much struggling is productive? I am not sure how I am going to make this part of my plan a reality...not yet.

5) Reflect and Learn - For many adults, this seems obvious. But how many times have you seen a student look at a grade on a test/quiz/assignment and then crumple it into a ball. I want to scream at the top of my lungs "It took me 10 minutes to grade your paper and write comments to you. The least you could do is look at them and try to learn something from your mistakes." OK, so screaming probably won't be good for my blood pressure. But I could have students completing the following sentence after every quiz. "I need to get a better understanding of BLANK." Then, they will describe what they will do to get a better understanding (such as, work through 5 examples of that type of problem and check their answer) or describe the conceptual error they made (such as, I thought the hypotenuse could be adjacent because it was next to the angle, but the hypotenuse is always across from the right angle. Adjacent sides must be one of the legs.)

Overall, I want to do less spoon-feeding and I want to provide my students with more opportunities for failure, because growing from failure = learning. Ideally the corrective feedback I give to students on their mistakes will lead them to recognizing and correcting their own errors.

Evaluating the Plan and Reapplying the Glue to Make It Stick

In the past my blogs have mostly been reflections on my teaching in general or some specific lesson I did in my classroom. That meant I only wrote when I felt like it and I didn't have a need to formally write and reflect all the time. Now I have a need to track the progress of my plan and blog about the reapplying of glue (or tape or velcro) needed to "Make It Stick". And in the process, I will be applying "The Science of Successful Learning" to my own teaching.

Additional Resources from Some Other Cool Teachers

As I was working on writing this blog, I came across some ideas from some other teachers that helped me refine my ideas and they may provide you with some useful ideas, too.